All praise to Christ, our Lord and King divine

When some texts are brought from ‘thou’ to ‘you’ language, something is admittedly lost. With others, there are compensating gains, and that is true here (as of 158 and several more). And while the late 20th c saw a flood of shorter song-texts drawing on the ‘Christ-hymn’ or ‘Song of Christ’s glory’ in Philippians 2:5–11 (or, more often, fragments of it), Francis Bland Tucker’s hymn from the 1st half of the century is a much fuller paraphrase of these verses, in their AV form. It was written in 1938 for the American Episcopalian book Hymnal 1940 and first published there; the 1951 BBC Hymn Book was the first of many British hymnals to include it. Dr Tucker allowed some subsequent editing of his text; but the more radical updating, with due permission, came after his death. Apart from line 1 (which was followed by ‘didst yield …’), the main changes are ‘bought’ for ‘wrought’ at 2.3; 3.1 for ‘Let this mind be in us which was in thee’; and 4.1–2 for ‘Wherefore, by God’s eternal purpose, thou/ art high exalted o’er all …’ In both versions, the hinge of the two movements of humiliation and glory is present, as ‘Wherefore’ or ‘so’, crucial in Philippians 2 but missing in many newer songs. The Scripture index for Praise! shows how popular these vv have been among other writers, but the only item comparable to this is At the name of Jesus (287, see note there and at 318) which does not set out to be a straight paraphrase.

The author wrote his text for Vaughan Williams’ SINE NOMINE. But in 1940 copyright restrictions prevented the printing of that tune to any text other than For all the saints for which it was composed; see also 85, note. So it was first printed to ENGELBERG, also intended for the older hymn but not restricted to it. Although these limitations no longer apply, something similar happens here since Joseph Barnby’s ST PHILIP, very different from W H Monk’s composition of the same name, was once the standard tune for W W How’s words at 585. It was published among the 119 hymns of The Sarum Hymnal of 1869, and was also known as PRO OMNIBUS SANCTIS—‘For all [the] saints’. Though in a minority, some still regard Vaughan Williams’ tune as inferior to this by Barnby.

b Norfolk, Virginia, USA 1895, d Savannah, Georgia, USA 1974. Univ of Virginia (BA 1914). The 13th child of Bp Beverley and Mrs Anna Tucker, he taught in Kyoto, Japan, and in 1916 joined the US army, working in a French hospital, and after the war studied at the Virginia Theological Seminary (BD 1920, DD 1940). Ordained in 1918 in what was then the Protestant Episcopal Ch of the USA, he was Rector of Grammer in S Virginia, 1920–25. His other parish appointments were at St John’s, Georgetown, Washington DC (1925–45) and Old Christ Ch, Savannah, Georgia (1945–67). Most of his hymns were written while he served on the revision and theological committees of the Episcopalian Hymnal 1940 and its supplements, and he was also a member of the Joint Commission on Ch Music, 1946–58. According to Erik Routley in 1979 his hymns are free of cliché, and ‘There is no better twentieth-century writing [in the USA or UK] than is to be found in Tucker’. A full tribute to his ‘many years of faithful service, [and] his glorious hymns’ is reprinted in The Hymnal 1982 Companion (1994, pp637–639), by some way the longest biographical note in that book. He also compiled More than Conquerors, a collection of 30 monthly letters written to his congregation during a long remission and recuperation from lung cancer. Baptist Praise and Worship (1991) has 3 of his texts; the A&M in 2000, Common Praise, has 5, and its Canadian counterpart with the same title (1998) 8, while 4 feature in the 2006 Evangelical Lutheran Worship and 7 in A Panorama of Christian Hymnody (2005 edn). Nos.395, 646.